Berlin Kiosk is a kind of jigsaw puzzle, that grew out of an illustraion-class at the UDK Berlin, led by EBoy. The core of the Project “Berlin Kiosk” are products, that you are able to buy at normal kiosk in reality – but as “pixelized” version, printed on wooden blocks. The initial design of the objects came from the famous Berlin Kiosks in underground-stations, where you can buy goods on the go.

From this kiosks, there is a lot to learn about complexity, diversity lack of space and the need for reduction.

Each single object has got two products: one on each side. Each set contains of 112 pieces. In total over 300 products were pixelized – ready to build you real-world-pixel-kiosk. Sweet, I love this humor.

Berlin Kiosk was made by Max Mondon. There was also a book released, but at first you will like to linger in the flickr-fotostream of this project.

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Brilliant Pixelartists don’t fall from trees. But there are people who know just how to place the right colors on the right places. Sven Ruthner is such a man. The demoscener known under the alias Ptoing just got the right feel for colors and for intense shapes and proportions. The illustrator works with different media, but is also very enthusiastic about vintage homecomputers, like using C64, Amiga or Spectrum ZX. Here are some of his works. Thanks Sven for your kind permission to post this stuff!

Dig into the works from Ptoing. It is really worth the time!! He’s got a website and a blog.

Update: Sven told me, that he surely is in love with – the old computers – but mainly works with a software called Cosmigo Pro Motion. Thanks for the hint!

Detail (scaled down) of a collaboration made with Martin Wörister.

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One of my favourite artists is Ranjit Bhatnagar aka Moonmilk. This year he participated the second time on the Thing-A-Day project. It is some sort of community-event, where the participants make one thing a day throughout the month. Moonmilk contributed and focused himself once again on music instruments. Just imagine! One music instrument a day! His works are based in the analogue, domain, but he also loves to involve electro-mechanical helpers like motors and stuff like that.

Some highlights from the making I want to show to you.

Day 19 – Garden Grammophon. Poetic!
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…appeared on the Internet. The Top Secret Document contains every know information, that is about PacMan. For example, just examine the lesser knows facts about the design of the levels and the mysterious level 256 in Pac Man. From the document:

Pac-Man was always meant to be a game with no ending. The developers at Namco mistakenly assumed the game’s increasing difficulty was sufficient to prevent anyone from playing indefinitely. Of course, within a few years of Pac-Man’s release, players had discovered that every level beyond the 21st was identical. Patterns were quickly created to exploit this fact and, for any player able to get past the first 20 levels, the game now became a test of endurance to see how many points you could rack up before losing focus and making a mistake. High scores soared into the millions and most players agreed the game simply went on forever. Eventually, a few highly-skilled players were able to complete 255 consecutive levels of play (scoring over three million points and taking several hours to accomplish) and found a surprise waiting for them on level 256. It was a surprise no one knew about-not even the developers at Namco.

The 256th level displays the left half of the maze correctly, but the right half is a jumbled mess of randomly colored letters, numbers, and symbols. Notice the bonus counter in the lower-right of the screen is also malfunctioning. The left side of the maze plays normally, but the right side is a different story. Although both the player and the ghosts can navigate through the right half of the screen, the original maze walls no longer apply. Instead, Pac-Man must be guided through a confusing series of open areas, tunnels, one-way intersections, lone walls, and pass-throughs-all invisible to the player-while four ghosts are in hot pursuit.

PacMan Level 265 with hidden points

You definitely want to know all this things about PacMan. The reason for the “malfunctioning level” i.e. lies in a internal counter error. Just keep on reading on the dossiers site. They also got extensive information about the enemy-characters as well.

Good, I have to try out this tool and at the same time suggest it to you. It is a *useful tool* and also got a very subtle kind of humor. Tools with humor? How does it work?

Write or die is meant for people who procrastinate lot or spend hours and hours slowly writing texts. This one will get you going. It supervises the words you type and measures the time of not. If the timeout is getting too big, you will be punished.

You begin your session by selecting the mode you want to work with: Select number of words, maximum session-time (=deadline?) and sort of evil-mode. The letter tells you, what kind of punishment you want, if you do not write, write, write like a slave (like me right know). The default mode is, that an “evil” sound will play on procrastination (I don’t think that sound is that bad / the sounds also differ). The most evil mode will delete the last words you typed, if you stop writing – so don’t answer the phone!

To be honest, you have to try this! This is really *useful*! And an interesting experience as well. I would doubt, that it enhances the quality of work in general, but in certain moods this can be really satisfying. Some people suggested to also implement “Design or Die”-modes into graphic software like Photoshop or Illustrator. Unfortunately this would not work at coding jobs… because there you have to think more!

PS:
The tools from Dr. Wicked generally focus on writing tasks. He goes:

Welcome to the Writing Lab, Applications for Authors. Actual help for the floundering ones, no namby-pamby advice. Utilities that help you get writing done, and tools to help you with the deeply annoying parts of the editing process.

via Prokrastination.com

The Gearhead Garage Adventure is an mixture of repair- and race game. You play a guy, who has great abilities in repairing cars, but not so much in driving them. So in parts this is a “repairing game”, some sort of mini-games, that let you put together and polish different parts of the car. Other sections of this game includes driving and exploring action. Look, feel, graphics and style look very, very promising. The game was made for the GBA, but was unfortunately never published, due to cartridge prices back in 2006. But you can cheer up, because there is a demo-GBA-file available on the website.

The game was made by Ratloop, who also are responsible for Mightier. It seems to me, that really Ratloop got distinct out-of-the-ordinary thinking abilities. Thank you guys at Tiny Cartridge so much for digging this content.

Well, I am not totally convinced of this App for the iPhone, but it looks neat. A guy called Deadmau5 created this application for the iPhone, probably to promote his music. It is some sort of dj-system, that lets you pitch and mix music. Or not music at all, but the 10 tracks/loops, that Deadmau5 pre-packaged on this application. The ability to fully customize is not given, you are “locked” to only do some “remix-grooves” with that app. Nevertheless a nice idea, that comes for 2.39 Euro. More infos on that at the Touch Mix Website.

via De:Bug